Jane Hart of C4PLT (Centre for Performance and Learning Technologies) is once again encouraging learning professionals to send her their ‘Top 10 Tools for Learning’ which will be aggregated into her top 100 (contributions are accepted until November).  The “Learning” here means both formal and informal learning and performance support, and the emphasis is on creating learning for others, and professional practice or productivity. The “tools” refers to software, online tools and services – so, if I’ve understood correctly, technologies such as voting systems and interactive whiteboards are not included.
This has prompted me to come up with my own Top Ten – as indicated above, this is mainly for online/onscreen tools, and isn’t really intended as a Top Ten priorities for teachers, especially those who are fairly new to technology (I’ve thought about that elsewhere). I’ve also added brief reasons why I like these technologies :-

1. Google reader: great way of receiving & organising incoming information
2. Blogs : more detail possible than in Twitter; allows reflection
3. Twitter : good for receiving (and giving) information, especially for ‘professional’ learning
4. Google docs : joint editing – really useful
5. Camstudio: free screen-casting application; great for making instructional videos
6. Google Earth : just brilliant for Geographical Sciences, Tourism etc (and a whole load of other things!)
7. Vue : free, downloadable, & v.adaptable application for flow-charts , mind-maps etc
8. Textwall: way of using mobile phones for feedback, voting etc
9. TeacherTube:  v,useful educational videos (watch, download, upload)
10. Del.icio.us : excellent research tool

I could have carried on, for there are plenty of other tools worthy of a mention -eg. Survey monkey, Phoebe pedagogic planner, VideoJug, DSpeech, Ning. Are there any obvious ones that I’be left out? Are there any good reasons for using an application that I haven’t listed?